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Introduction:

This is really long, so if you're looking for a quick fix, read something else!

The Adventures of Béla, the Vampire Girl
Book 4: Time Walker
Part 2b
Chapter 9 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“You ready?” Béla asked, calling upstairs to where Jake was.

She sighed. He always made them late to the club.

Jake appeared at the top of the stairs. “Sorry. I was talking to Frank about Jake and Tabatha.”

“They find out anything?” Béla asked.

She already knew they hadn’t. She could see it in Jake’s mind.

“No,” he said. “Frank thinks that you should go over there again…”

“No, Jake,” Béla interrupted. “I’ve been over there three times. The only stuff I picked up was some old erotic images from Tabatha. I had the Praetor make copies to analyze. I can’t tell where she… they… went. There aren’t any distinct locations. It’s like they just disappeared off the face of the earth. I told the Praetor to do whatever it could to find her.”

They usually took public transportation there, so people could see them arrive. Then afterward, if they could find some privacy, and it was pretty easy because of the private rooms available for consenting parties, Béla would teleport them home. If she was conscious, that is. Quite often, her sexual excesses at these SAM Club meetings left her mortally wounded and completely orgasmed out.

Béla was wearing a little striped job that Tanya had given her now that Tanya’s public persona, Tootsie, had unofficially suicided on that ‘skewer-bot’ last month. It was a dark blue number that was mostly, well, all right, completely transparent. It showed everything through a fine net of dark blue nylon. Béla didn’t wear anything beneath it. Her naturally hairless pussy allowed her entire body to be admired through the material without drawing special undue attention to any large, mysterious, dark areas – except her nipples, of course, and they were only visible, not admirably huge. But that didn’t stop anyone from looking.

Jake didn’t like to dress up and play the fop, like Frank did when he took Tanya, or rather, Tootsie, partying. SAM Clubs were more for the male domination and torture of females, so it was the females who were on display, from the moment they walked in. Jake liked it that way and so did Béla. There were also FEM Clubs for the female dominants, and Suicide Clubs when both partners were submissive.

The club Jake and Béla belonged to was a bondage club that hosted two sub-groups – one specialized in burning with candles and candle wax torture, and the other specialized in freaky (and sometimes fatal) body penetration. Upon entering, each couple would submit the female’s name to a lottery. The winner, or loser, depending on that month’s theme for each group, would be displayed on stage while everyone else fucked their brains out in a convention-hall-sized orgy while they watched that month’s torture theme play out on stage.

Béla had been chosen several months ago and was tied to a torture rack and splashed with hot wax. Afterward, she was left hanging on the rack for everyone’s use and was fucked several times by other club members.

Usually, there were two displays, and Béla was hoping to be chosen for one again this month. Quite often, the displays were unusually cruel, especially the ones involving unusual body penetration, which sometimes caused permanent disfigurement or even death to the lottery winner.

In cases where the volunteer display girl died, the club couldn’t be prosecuted. It was no longer illegal to kill someone if they signed a release stating their awareness of that possibility. The official Supreme Court ruling was: ‘It isn’t murder if the victim agreed to be killed for the purpose of entertainment.’

That ruling was the result of the ‘State vs. Brandy Wine Tasting Productions’ when the company’s prime underground performer and co-owner, Brandy Wine, was repeatedly raped and viciously murdered as the plot for what became her best-selling underground performance. The underground production company was able to prove that Ms. Wine, upon discovering that she only had a few months to live because of widespread, inoperable cancer, had actually written the script in which she would be strangled to death while being gang-raped. ‘I can’t think of a better way to go than being fucked to death,’ she told Spike Magazine, an underground tabloid, just before performing her final scene.

That Supreme Court ruling opened the door for hundreds of Suicide Clubs all over the country to come above ground, offering thousands of excited new members that last, extra thrill of a lifetime, with the emphasis on ‘last’.

Jake personally thought Suicide Clubs were a good idea. They reduced the total number of morons in this country every month they were in operation. As far as ‘Mental Hygiene’ went, he was surprised that Hitler never thought of it. Suicide Clubs were cleansing the human race of idiots.

But, Jake realized, Hitler would probably have made Suicide Clubs mandatory, and Jake believed Mental Hygiene should be voluntary. Of course, the problem with voluntary Mental Hygiene was that the very people who shouldn’t reproduce were the same ones who most fervently believed in their God-given right to ‘Go forth and multiply,’ which they did with great abandon, covering the planet with more morons like themselves.

Jake and Béla arrived and gave their names at the reception table. John, the receptionist, already knew Béla and knew she liked the most torturous devices the club could come up with.

“Show up at stage two if you’re not a ‘chosen’, sweetie,” he told Béla. “Whoever wins that stage will probably decline, then they’ll ask for volunteers.”

He handed her the Suicide form and she signed it without reading it. They both knew, no matter what demonic device she would be strapped, tied or lowered into tonight, Béla would most likely be game enough to try it. Stage two was the ‘unusual penetration’ stage. She smiled as she handed the form back.

John smiled, too, and took the signed liability form from her. “Thanks, sweetie. I hope you live to come back next month.”

He practically drooled on her blue mesh costume that covered, but didn’t conceal, her hard little nipples.

Jake looked through the display brochures. “Hey, they have an auction block this time.”

Jake liked the auction block. Béla brought in higher bids than almost any other girl in the club and Jake loved the fact that his dark-haired little vampire was one of the hottest girls there – it was a real ego trip!

“Yes,” John replied. “The club had decided that the ‘block’ is the best way to finance its monthly meetings. That way, the ones who use the club the most give it the most financial support.”

Jake nodded in response, then he and Béla turned toward the main entrance. As soon as they entered the converted conference room, An older lady swooped down on Béla like a vulture.

“Béla, darling!” she crooned, reminding Béla of Cruella (yes, she saw that cartoon movie a hundred years earlier, sometime back in the early ’90’s).

“Leticia, how are you?” Béla smiled back. “I saw your display last month. You were magnificent. But I’m surprised you’re walking already. That hook must have really been painful.”

“Morphine works wonders, darling,” Leticia replied. “And my body sculpturist is taking the stitches out next week, then I can display the scars.”

Leticia had more scars from burns and bodily penetrations than anyone else in the club – anyone still alive, that is. Lots of club members sought her out every month just so they could run their hands over her scars while they fucked what was left of her brains out.

“If you decide to paint designs around your scars to better display them,” Béla suggested, “I would love to do it for you. I have some great ideas. Call me, okay?”

Leticia nodded, then was practically dragged away by her husband. “Don’t talk to her! She's a bad influence! You want to live to collect your security, don’t you?”

Béla grinned and looked at her lifemate. “I guess I’m getting a bit of a reputation as a pain-crazy masochist.”

The first display was beginning. A buxom blonde girl was being led out onto stage. She was blindfolded. The blindfold was all she was wearing. She was made to lie down on her stomach while a large iron crossbar was lowered from the ceiling. Manacles were snapped around her thighs and upper arms, then attached, one at each protruding end of the cross bar.

The girl was then raised, face down, back into the air by the stage handlers, each one on a separate chain. One of the stage handlers produced a rope, about a foot long with hooks on each end, and tied the two chains together under her torso. When they let go, it was obvious that the rope stretched across the girl’s stomach was supporting her entire weight. If it broke, the chains would unravel around the pulleys and she would come crashing down.

A table was brought out with several tapered candles on it and positioned beneath the girl’s swaying body. Each candle was lit, then positioned carefully beneath some specific, tender part of the hanging girl’s anatomy. The first one went under her right breast, the next one under her left. One was placed under her pelvis. Then the remaining one was lit and placed directly beneath the rope around her waist.

“Oh my god!” Béla exclaimed, getting wet between her legs just watching. “I would love to be that girl up there!”

She watched as the girl was slowly, inch by inch, lowered toward the candles. When she cried out, the winch was stopped, then she was raised a little. The stage handlers readjusted a couple of the candle positions, then walked off, leaving her hanging there.

To the normal observer, the girl seemed to be positioned high enough over the candles to be unaffected by the tiny flames. The truth was slightly different. The candle wax was melting quickly – more quickly than the wick burned down. Each candle flame grew longer as the wax melted and exposed more wick to burn.

In moments, the girl on display was twitching and crying out as her nipples began to pop and sizzle in the heat rising from the candles. She managed to start swinging a little, relieving her tits from the scorching heat. The candles farther down the table were doing the same to her belly and pussy, but her main source of torment was her tender, scorched nipples.

Because she was swinging now, the stage handlers came out and lowered her body down closer to the tiny flames. Soon, she was swinging only inches above them, whimpering each time her breasts passed through a candle flame. She was feeling the burning on her pelvis and stomach now, and twitched each time her body hesitated in its swing over those candles, too.

The club members watching were getting aroused with the girl’s writhing and her cries. It was almost as though the tiny flames that caressed her body were raping the girl. Béla pressed her hand against Jake’s hard dick inside his jeans while she watched several club members begin fucking each other.

Then Béla had Jake’s hard cock out in her hand. She moved in front of him, standing with her back to him so she could watch the show and the orgy going on around her and the girl suffering on the stage. As she backed up against Jake, he grabbed her under her arms and lifted her up. His cock slid down her back, then disappeared into the space between her legs. Then he lowered her down until she could feel his cock pressing against her vulva.

Still being held in the air, and unable to move her arms down, Béla humped her pelvis back and forth, rubbing her cunt lips against the length of his marvelous cock. After a moment, she could feel moisture coating his smooth silky flesh. She raised her legs up behind her, almost touching his butt with her heels, and pressed her legs against Jake’s sides.

Now that she had more control over the angle of her body, she twitched her pelvis forward and was rewarded with Jake’s wonderful cock almost ‘popping’ right into her hungry, wet pussy.

The girl hanging on the stage was crying and begging to be released. The rope around her torso had finally begun to burn, causing unimaginable pain and scorching burns that would probably scar her for life.

‘God! I wish I was up there!’ Béla thought, excited by the scene and the lust radiating from the fucking couples around her.

Her pussy gushed at the thought of those wonderfully delicate tongues of flame licking at her belly, her cunt, her breasts. She came as she imagined how it would feel to be dropped onto those burning candles, bringing her torment to an abrupt end in one agonizing, scorching orgasm.

Then it happened! The rope burned through and the girl dropped, screeching, onto the burning candles. She screamed in agony and bucked furiously, trying to get away from the hot, waxy remnants of the smashed candles. Finally, she just lay there, gasping and crying.

The show now over, someone came out with a needle gun and administered something into her arm. In another moment, the girl was very relaxed, but still conscious. She was turned over and put on a litter, then carried down off the stage and onto the main floor to be displayed. Several men gathered around and began masturbating over her burnt, scorched body while she watched them worship her, drugged to the eyeballs so that she could enjoy her wounded body being displayed and fondled.

Béla noticed that the girl’s breasts were scorched and badly blistered. There was even a puncture wound where a candle had pierced into her half-cooked nipple when the girl had landed on it. Those wounds would heal, Béla realized, but her breasts would always be super-sensitive to heat after this. The worst burns were from the rope around her waist. No body sculpturist would be able to erase that scarring.

She watched as people began spraying their cum onto the girl. She felt Jake’s cock twitch. He was getting ready to come, too. He pulled out of her. She turned so she could see her husband’s face.

“Do you want to come on her, too?” she asked.

Jake shook his head. “I want to come on you!” he exclaimed, gritting his teeth in his effort to hold back. “I’ve wanted to spray cum all over that dress since the first instant I saw it on you!”

Béla grinned and dropped to her knees, arching her back to display her body through the transparent fabric. She slid forward so her knees were around his boots. She didn’t want to waste a drop falling on the floor.

“Fire away, baby!” she cried, and arched her head back.

She loved being covered in cum, especially Jake’s cum. She was disappointed that she could barely feel the cum spattering down on her through the nylon fabric. But when she looked, she could see it glistening on the material covering her breasts and belly. She smiled up at him, satisfied in her altered appearance and her wonderful new scent.

“Do you mind?” someone beside her said.

A stranger had his cock out and was playing with it. Béla looked at Jake to see what he thought. Jake grinned and nodded his head.

“Sure, go ahead,” Béla told the guy.

She felt a little guilty about stealing part of the show from the blond girl, especially after all the pain and agony the girl went through to be the star attraction. But this was an orgy, after all. In a moment, there were two more men around her, trying to masturbate on her sexy, see-through dress.

‘I didn’t know I looked this sexy,’ she whispered into Jake’s mind as he stood, watching her.

‘If you can hold that position long enough,’ Jake thought back at her, ‘I’ll come around and fuck you in your mouth.’

Before Jake could walk around the men jacking off on his wife, someone else shoved a cock in her waiting mouth. Although Béla couldn’t see who it was, she knew it wasn’t Jake. She knew Jake’s cock, and this wasn’t it. She happily began sucking on it anyway.

‘Guess I’ll have to wait my turn,’ Jake thought, cheerfully watching his little slut wife do what she did best. He heard Béla choke as the guy shot his cum down her throat. Béla was getting better. Anymore, she only choked on cum when her head was upside down like it was now.

The guy coming in her mouth caused the other three who were jacking off to shoot their loads all over Béla’s transparent dress and on their own shoes and pants. Béla straightened up, stretching her stiff back and licking cum off her face. She looked down at her dress, pleased to discover that she was positively speckled with cum, now.

Remaining on her knees, she leaned forward and began sucking Jake’s cock. Her dress was beginning to feel cold and clammy against her body with all that cum on it. But being covered with all that cum, along with the taste of it in her mouth, was making her horny again. Now that she was sitting more upright, Jake’s cum from her earlier fucking was beginning to leak down her leg as well, making her even hornier.

Béla projected an image into Jake’s mind of how all that cum on her and running down her legs was affecting her. She felt his cock jerk in response. Then he was spewing lots of the wonderfully sticky stuff into her mouth, flooding her mouth and throat with it. She swallowed as fast as she could, but it was coming out faster than she could swallow. Despite all her efforts, some leaked out and down her chin.

Jake tucked himself back into his jeans, then reached down to help his cum-soaked wife to her feet. He held her out at arms’ length admiring the work of his fellow male humans.

“You look magnificent!” he told her, grinning brightly.

“I feel really horny!” she replied.

Jake grinned and pulled her sticky body up against his, enjoying the wetness that soaked into his shirt as he kissed her cum-covered lips.

“You are the most marvelous slut in the world,” he told her, breaking their kiss.

Jake nodded and they both turned toward the auction block. Every few minutes, someone offered his wife or sexual partner to be sold to the highest bidder. The one who bought her could do anything they wanted to her for the next hour except kill or permanently maim her. When her temporary owner was through with her, she was either returned to her husband, or to the auction block to earn more credits for the club treasury.

Jake handed his wife over to the barter. The man took out a primitive clipboard and began writing on it with an actual pencil. Béla stared at it, not remembering the last time she saw a pencil – or a pen, for that matter. Everything was electronic, now.

He frowned, then put his hand out and felt the fabric of her dress. “Hum. Alright. You’ll do nicely. Step over here, please. Have you signed your form?”

“Yes, when I came in,” Béla replied, “but that was for Stage Two.”

“Really!” the barter exclaimed, looking her over again. “I don’t know why you’d want to scar up a stunning body like yours. But, to each her own, I suppose.”

He turned away from her and stepped out on the platform.

“Our next item, lot number twenty-five,” he said into the mike. Then, to Béla, he said, “Step over on the lighted circle, dear.”

He continued into the microphone, “She is approximately twenty-two years old and a ‘B’ cup. Her body is flawlessly smooth and well toned. No tattoos or noticeable scarring. She is literally covered with cum – in her hair, her mouth, on her dress and between her legs. Raise your dress, my dear.”

Béla lifted her short skirt up around her waist and swayed her hips from side to side. The insides of her thighs and her bare pussy glistened with cum in the light she was standing on. The watching members applauded, whistled and cheered. Smiling at her new fans, she dropped her dress back down. Several men booed at her for that.

“Alright, gentlemen,” the barter said, restoring some semblance of order.

He looked around the room. Further away from the auction platform, there were people fucking each other on the floor. On the far side of the conference room, a group of men were still jacking off on the blond girl from Stage One. But several people, noticing who was on the auction platform, were coming this way, hoping to bid on the alluring, dark-haired beauty displayed there.

“The bidding will start at one hundred credits,” the barter announced. “And she won’t take her dress off for less than two thousand.”

He grinned and winked at her. No one had been auctioned for more than two thousand credits tonight.

“One hundred,” someone said. “Two hundred!” “Five!” “Seven hundred!”

The bidding went on. In a minute or so, it was at seventeen hundred credits. The next bid would break the record for this evening’s auction.

“Eighteen hundred,” Jake called out.

“You can’t bid on your own wife, sir,” the barter informed him.

“Nineteen!” someone cried out near the back.

The barter said, “We have nineteen hundred credits for this gorgeous cum-covered slut. Will anyone offer two thousand to get her out of that uncomfortably damp dress?”

“Nineteen-fifty!” someone called out.

“Nineteen-ninety-nine!” someone else yelled.

The barter looked over the crowd, then spotted who had called out that last bid. “You mind my asking, sir, why you didn’t simply bid two thousand?”

“Cause I wanna fuck her while she’s still wearin’ that dress!” he yelled back.

“Very well, then,” the barter announced, pleased with the action he was getting. “We will close the bidding at nineteen-hundred and ninety-nine credits. Step over to the ‘share’ bar, my dear. How many takers do we have?”

Six or seven horny men raised their hands. The barter held out his receiver. As the bidding clientele pressed their hand units, he called out numbers.

He held out his receiver. “No? Very well, then. Do you wish to bid to establish order of use?” No one seemed to want to pay more. “No? Then lot number twenty-five is sold for – eight thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five credits. The owners may pick up their merchandise at the staircase. You may step down now, my dear.”

Béla walked across the stage waving at the crowd. They cheered back at her. As she stepped down, several people greeted her.

“You’re my new masters?” she asked cheerfully.

Béla knew that for eight thousand credits, she was going to have to give a really great performance for the next hour or so. She looked forward to an evening of pure sexual excess, polishing it off (hopefully) with Jake’s big cock in her ass when they returned her well-used body to him. It looked like Stage Two was going to have to wait ’til next month.

As she was collared and led away, she waved at her husband. Since he was the one who had sold her, he wasn’t permitted to participate. But her owners were required to return her to him when they were finished using her. Jake waved back and blew her a kiss.

‘Have fun! Happy gang-bang!’

Béla was led into a lounge that was cordoned off for private use. She wondered if this horny group had any special expectations. She could see in their minds that two were simply mesmerized by her appearance. She looked so incredibly fuckable that they just had to bid on her. They all wanted to fuck her, even the girl. She wanted her husband to fuck Béla while she sat on Béla’s face, turned so she could kiss her husband while he played with her breasts.

One thing they all had in common – they wanted her to leave her cum-soaked dress on. They planned on adding a lot more.

‘Easy crowd,’ Béla thought to herself.

She would dance for them, maybe play with herself, making them good and horny (and herself, as well), then fuck their brains out.

‘Good plan!’

“Auk!” Béla gurgled as the chain on her collar was attached to a floor ring. The chain was too short to allow her to remain standing upright. She looked at the person who’d fastened her down, then dropped to her knees, knowing that was what was expected of her.

“She's a good slave,” one said, noticing the promptness of her response to being short-chained.

‘Crap! They just want blowjobs! No fun for me…’

“Why are you all covered with cum?” the one who chained her down asked.

Béla looked into his mind. His name was David. He was a dominant, like her husband, only meaner. She didn’t like the way his mind worked. He wanted her for himself and planned something so the others wouldn’t find her desirable anymore.

“Men jerked off on me, Master,” she knew how to behave as a submissive. “And then they fucked me. Master.”

“And what are you going to do for us tonight, slave?” he asked.

“I’m at your disposal, Master,” Béla said, knowing exactly where he was leading her.

She began concentrating on his dick, following his nerve strands and various vessels up into his groin, looking for something she could use to disable the bastard without being blamed for it.

The others, less forceful and somewhat fearful of him, decided to wait for their turn with her.

“Good slut!” David complemented her as she sucked him hard. Béla found was she was looking for – a tiny stone in his bladder. It was small enough so that it would pass without any notice. There were other semi-solid cells floating in his bladder, too. She collected them with her mind, adding their tiny mass to the stone. In less than a minute, she had a sizable stone that would give him excruciating pain if he followed through with his plan to ruin her for her other masters.

“You’re good for my disposal, slut!” he snarled at her. “And that’s how I’m going to use you – as a disposal unit!”

Béla pulled back as David started pissing into her mouth. He grabbed her hair as she moved sideways to get out of his way. Then he was doubled over in pain as the huge stone entered his penis and began its journey outward, blocking the flow of urine.

David was rolling on the floor, holding his dick and screaming. Béla was yanking on her chain, acting terrified and trying to get out of his way as he repeatedly tried to kick her.

“Medic!” Béla yelled at the top of her lungs.

Because of the type of club it was, there were always a dozen medics on hand. One rushed into the room almost immediately.

“What happened?” he yelled, trying to be heard over the screaming man in the middle of the floor.

“Bitch! She bit me!” he yelled.

He tried to kick her again. Béla shook her head in denial, still yanking on the chain and trying to get away from his kicking feet.

“I didn’t!” she cried. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him! He tried to piss on me! I didn’t do anything!”

The medic pulled out his needle gun, standard equipment around here, and shot David full of tranquilizers – the same stuff someone had shot the blond girl full of after her performance with the candles. After a few seconds, David lay back, much more relaxed, but still trembling and covered with sweat.

The medic pulled out a scanner and began recording David condition, starting with his dick. He didn’t need to go very far.

“He has a blockage,” the medic announced. “Looks like a kidney stone. I’m surprised something that size got that far. Usually, if it can get in to the bladder, it can get out, again. The ‘exit’ tube is much larger.”

“Is that what’s wrong with him?” Béla asked, her voice shaking as she still played the innocent victim.

“Yep,” the medic replied. He looked up at two stage handlers who had heard the man screaming and come to help. “Put him in the truck with the Olsen girl. As soon as the next performance is over, we’ll take them all in one trip.”

“The next performance?” Béla asked.

She looked into the medic’s mind. He meant Stage Two. Every month when the SAM Club met, his unit usually took one, and sometimes two, victims of self-inflicted mutilations to the hospital. This time, now that he already had two, he expected one more because of the special presentation, the reenaction of a famous Star Trek scene where the Romulan commander of the Enterprise interrogates a Klingon officer. The snuff girl who played the Klingon officer in the original Tri-d release later died from her injuries, giving the production much more notoriety.

The stage handlers carried poor David out on a floating trundle.

“We should begin our hour again,” Béla suggested to the others.

However, no one was horny now. The other two men released Béla from her obligations as an auctioned slave until the following month, or later tonight, if they ran into each other again. The man who was there with his wife invited Béla and her husband to their home for dinner and an evening of entertainment. Béla, as their slave, accepted gracefully. She didn’t mind going out for dinner. She wouldn’t be the one cleaning up afterwards. And she suspected that she was to be the entertainment.

The couple returned Béla to her husband in the waiting area. Jake stood up, noticing that Béla didn’t look much different than she had fifteen minutes ago.

“Hi, Hon,” Jake said, hugging her. “What happened to the gang bang?”

“It went bust,” she told him. “Some guy tried to ruin it for the others by pissing on me.”

“You put him in the hospital?” Jake asked, knowing how she felt about that.

Béla nodded. ‘Damned right I did!’

“These are my auction owners,” Béla said, introducing the pair behind her. “This is Nick, and this is Nova. Compton, is it?”

Nova nodded.

“In order to fulfill my obligation as an auction slave, they want to invite us for dinner,” she told him.

“Sounds like fun,” Jake said, smiling. “That way, she can spend more than the requisite hour with you.”

“Yeah,” Béla agreed. “But, with this arrangement, you get Nova.”

“You both get me,” Nova offered. “I still want to make love to you, Betty.”

“Maybe not,” Nick replied. “If she’s still alive after the performance, they’ll put her on display. She probably won’t live long anyway, so maybe they’ll let us have her after that. She still owes us an hour, and club policy insists that members are indebted for any monies earned for the club…”

Chapter 10 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Who’s next on the agenda,” the goddess Elaine asked the court assistant.

“Mr. Jake Hedron, Goddess,” the man replied.

The Golden Goddess sighed. This was his fourth petition to retrieve his wife from exile on Earth. She’d been exiled several months ago for treason against her husband’s family, causing the deaths of everyone in his family and two of Elaine’s immortal sisters.

“Show him in,” she said quietly.

She never turned anyone away, even a worthless pest like Hedron who, instead of going to university and learning a useful trade (security not being a viable trade in New Eden), spent his time sorting through and cataloging the records that the librarian Sabrina had spent half her life downloading from the last remaining Praetor.

“Thank you for seeing me, Goddess,” Jake said, as he was admitted into the temple court.

Elaine noticed that he walked crouched over, although his physical fitness was still that of a twenty-year-old human. She knew what pain caused him to walk that way, but was still unwilling to change her mind about his exiled wife. As her primary accuser, only the goddess Elaine could make the request to terminate the woman’s exile and she had no intention of doing so.

“What is it this time, Master Hedron?” Elaine asked tiredly, already knowing the answer.

She called him ‘Master’ because he was working in the records department at university. He spent most of his time trying to find a historical precedence that would free his wife, but he was also putting university’s historical records in order, so perhaps he had some use, after all.

“I’ve come across an entry that describes the beginning of the university Praetor’s usage. It seems that Béla actually destroyed the previous Praetor because of some misunderstanding of its intentions regarding her continued survival.”

Elaine frowned at the human who dared to use her dead sister’s name, but honored her decision to hear him out, despite the fact that she wanted nothing more than to teleport him onto the outer surface of the little hollow moon they occupied.

“Continue,” she commanded.

“Um, thank you, Goddess,” Jake murmured nervously. “It seems that a Praetor is capable of recharging itself using the, um, ‘souls’, if I may use that word, of the people it comes into intimate contact with.”

“Yes?” Elaine asked. “And your point, Good Sir?”

“There is a Praetor still on earth,” he said, knowing he wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t already know. “If Tabatha could be guided so that she could find that Praetor, perhaps she could…”

“So Tabatha’s life is to be wasted to pay for something she didn’t know she was doing?” Jake cried out. “It was my family that died! I should have some say in what happens to her!” Elaine looked down at him in pity. It always came down to the same argument. “She's all I have left.”

“Your request is refused, whatever it would be, Master Hedron. No one knows where the Praetor on earth is, so whatever new scheme you’ve hatched to rescue your wife is, by this fact alone, thwarted,” Elaine said quietly. “Aaron, please show Master Hedron out.

Elaine stepped down off her seat. She wasn’t enjoying her job any more. She hadn’t enjoyed much of anything since her sister was drugged and murdered, two centuries ago.

The worst part of it, now – the part about living on, anyway – was the indeterminable waiting for a tiny ball of fire eight hundred million kilometers away to burst. No one was certain if New Eden was far enough away to be protected by Jupiter’s mass when the big event finally occurred. No one was certain that even massive Jupiter, itself, would survive the incredible assault of energy the sun would release when it went nova.

‘What if it’s all a waste,’ Elaine thought as she walked toward the goddess’ mansion.

She imagined some lizard-like child (the only alien race she’d ever met) pointing up at the night sky at the pretty new star, not realizing that the bright light that so enamoured him announced the demise of two intelligent species.

‘Is that what all our endeavors boil down to?’ she lamented. ‘A bright light in some alien child’s eye?’

She entered the mansion through the front door. That in itself was unusual, for the Golden Goddess usually flew directly to the balcony entrance of her quarters. Their quarters – she and Jacob, her life-mate.

He met her at the door, Jacob did, surprising the goddess with his infectious grin and lightening her mood, as always.

It wasn’t a question as much as an acknowledgement of his devotion to her. He didn’t answer. He just kissed her.

“What do I smell?” she asked, brightening up even more.

Jacob, Elaine discovered early in their relationship, could cook. So when Chef passed away, several years after she’d officially made Jacob her lifemate, Jacob took over the cooking for everyone in the mansion.

“Come and find out,” he replied, then led her into the dining hall.

Dinner was a meat loaf made from lamb, pureed rice, mushrooms, onions and yesterday’s bread (sun dried and crumbled, then mixed in with pureed tomato) and eggs. It was lightly spiced with salt, pepper, dried garlic and ginger. Potatoes pureed with cream and chives, then spiced with pepper, paprika and garlic accompanied the lamb loaf. Everyone thought it was wonderful. Elaine thought it was another of Jacob’s wonderful sausage dishes he often served. In fact, the lamb loaf was called ‘sausage’ loaf.

Shortly after Jacob took over the cooking for the mansion, he decided to wean Elaine off sausage. To him, sausage was the most unhealthy, grease-laden non-meat that had ever been invented by mankind. After experimenting around for several years, he discovered a combination of lamb, rice and mushrooms that he could make taste just like sausage, right down to the texture. By adding a small amount of bacon fat, even Elaine couldn’t tell the difference.

So, Jacob very covertly began to replace the sausage that Elaine craved in her diet with lamb, rice and mushrooms. In less than a year, she was unknowingly weaned off sausage completely. Over the next few years, he gradually cut down on the amount of grease, also. Now, Elaine could have all the sausage dishes she desired (and he had taken the time to learn sixty different ways to prepare it for her), and she and the rest of the household were eating healthy.

In addition, to protect the recipes that he kept in his head, he asked Elaine’s sister, Dawn, to show him how to shield those images in his mind so that none of the other telepathic goddesses could raid his mind and serve his gourmet dishes in their own districts. In addition, the shield protected him from Elaine ever finding out she wasn’t eating sausage.

Jacob normally didn’t prepare desserts with starch-heavy meals like the one they’d just eaten, so, after the main course, Elaine and Jacob retired upstairs while the servants cleaned up.

“Play for me?” Elaine asked, smiling at him.

“Of course, My Queen,” Jacob grinned back at her.

He recalled when he met her. The goddess had come to him in the middle of his sleep period. They’d made love for hours and hours. Then he’d played his pipe for her. After mere minutes of pouring his heart out to her on his pipe, Elaine knew she was in love.

His current pipe was an instrument he was proud of. It was the fourth one he’d carved; each one more exquisite and intricate than the previous one as he learned more about the instrument. This one was capable of producing two tones at once from the same mouthpiece. He’d even written several compositions specifically for this instrument, although it was the only one of its kind in existence.

~~~~~

Jake Hedron had returned to university after his abrupt dismissal from the temple audience chamber. It had been more that three months now since his wife, Tabatha was taken from him and, in a trial lasting less than an hour, sentenced to exile on a barren, baked Earth. The justices had immediately surrounded her and teleported her there after stripping her of her powers. He hadn’t even been allowed to say goodbye to her.

Since that day, Jake had relentlessly spent every free moment learning as much as he could about the justice system, the powers of the goddesses, previous judgements; anything he could use in an attempt to free his wife. Today was the first time he’d tried subterfuge, attempting to create a situation where his wife would have access to a Praetor, the ultimate lawgiver in this society.

He knew that if Tabatha could access a Praetor, she could possibly convince it to retry her case, if she were even still alive, that is. Earth today was a dry, dead, radioactive wasteland with limited plant and insect life. Tabatha was fit, strong-willed and resourceful. But she was a city girl, and… Three months of scrounging for food and water? Jake doubted that even he could survive those conditions.

He spent the next six hours researching Béla’s trial where she’d murdered a landowner and taken over his estates. He didn’t find anything he could use, but now he understood why she had been given the freedom to govern herself free of any impediments.

Exhausted from his efforts, and heartsick that he may never see Tabatha again, he staggered to his cot in the dormitory. That night, for the first time, she came to him in his dreams.

He woke up. There was someone sitting on the cot, tipping the thin mattress at an odd angle. Sitting up in the darkness, he could see a silhouette. There was a female sitting on the bed with him.

“Jake?” she asked, seeming as surprised to see him as he was to see her.

“Tabatha?” he asked, incredulous. “How? When did you get back? I petitioned at the temple again today and the goddess didn’t mention your return.”

“I’m…” Tabatha began.

Then Jake was hugging her – almost crushing her against him, sobbing his relief that she still lived and she was with him, again.

“I’m still on earth, darling,” Tabatha told him when he let her breathe again. “The Praetor taught me how to dream-walk so I could visit you.”

“I’m dreaming this?” Jake asked, his elation crashing down as fast as it had risen.

“Yes,” Tabatha said quietly. “And so am I!”

She reached forward to kiss him again.

“Oh, God! I’ve missed you so!” Jake exclaimed ardently.

He pulled her down with him on the cot. She responded, kissing him warmly and wrapping her arms tightly around him. Then Jake noticed how thin she was. She was thinner now than she was immediately after she’d teleported them both into this horrid future they were trapped in.

Tabatha, her empathic abilities working now that she wasn’t in her body, noticed his worry immediately.

“There’s food and water here,” she said, hoping to ease his mind. “The sun’s really hot and it burns me every day, but I heal at night, and the sky is really beautiful. The Northern Lights cover the entire night sky and are so bright you can only see the most brilliant stars behind them.”

“You’ve found food and water?” Jake asked, “and the Praetor, too? How did you manage all that?”

Tabatha opened her mind to him, letting him see some of the less traumatic ordeals she’d gone through in the last week or so. She didn’t let him see earlier than that – she didn’t want him to know how she’d managed to survive from day to day by eating bugs and drinking mud until she’d finally found that food cache.

She let him see that, for the last hour or so before she came to visit him in his sleep, she and the Praetor had practiced her dream-walking to teleport things she needed to survive without triggering the image detector placed in her skull by the justices.

The first thing she’d dream-walked back to Béla’s ruined house was tomorrow’s menu from the food cache she’d discovered in Somerville. Then she’d searched, still dream-walking, for containers to hold water and dream-walked them to her little stream near the Washington Street Bridge. Once she had both food and water and was settled into Béla’s roofless ruins, she dream-walked to New Eden to visit Jake, feeling much happier than she believed she would ever feel again.

“So, here I am,” Tabatha cheerfully concluded her visual update.

Jake couldn’t believe how upbeat she sounded, especially since he had spent the last three months in the deepest depression imaginable.

“You are so incredible!” he exclaimed, radiating pure joy at her seeming well-being. He hugged her to him again. “But you’re so skinny! You never got a chance to fill out after you brought us here.”

“It took a long time to find food here,” Tabatha admitted. “Most of the food, even canned goods, is so irradiated by the sun that it’s spoiled. And Massachusetts is so dry, now. There used to be hundred of rivers and lakes. And millions of trees. They’re all gone – dried up. Most of the trees are gone, too. I think maybe insects ate them.”

“Oh, termites, ants,” Tabatha replied. “This planet’s been dead a long time. It probably took them a long time to eat all the trees.”

“So you’re doing all right?” Jake asked, wanting her to lie, if necessary, to ease his mind.

She could see that, too. She also saw that it embarrassed him to believe that he was that callous. She smiled at him in the darkness.

“It’s lonely,” Tabatha said, her quiet voice belying the desolate emotion behind her words. “I would have died for someone to talk to.”

She hugged him tighter, opening her mind further to let him know how wonderful she felt stretched out against him, molding her body against his from her head to her toes.

She withheld the fact that she really hadn’t missed him. She had been too busy, trying to survive in that forsaken wasteland the justices had dropped her into, to spend all her emotional energy grieving because her husband wasn’t sharing her terrible fate. Her mind simply didn’t work that way.

She was extremely glad that he wasn’t with her in this horrible, desolate place. It surprised her to realize that she could live without Jake, but she would rather be without him than have him trapped on Earth with her. But, if given a different choice, it was much more wonderful to be with him than to be alone, even if she could only be with him in her dreams.

Jake’s body responded to the pleasure she radiated though him, quickly reminding him that he hadn’t made love to her for three long, lonely months. He began caressing Tabatha’s back and shoulders and discovered she was covered with incrusted dirt.

“It helps keep the sun from burning too badly,” she explained when he asked her. “And it keeps bugs off at night when I’m sleeping.”

“Why don’t you sleep during the day?” he asked her.

“You try sleeping when the temperature is over a hundred every day,” she replied. “I’ve passed out from the heat, but that’s not sleeping. Besides, the bugs don’t come out during the day.”

“Bugs come out at night?” he asked, wondering what she meant.

Tabatha shuddered, unintentionally broadcasting images of waking up to swarms of tiny, red ants covering her body and trying to eat her alive. She could regenerate as fast as they tore their tiny chunks of flesh off her, and actually found the sensation of being eaten alive somewhat erotic, minute though their little mandibles were.

“That’s the vampire blood in you, darling,” Jake explained, smiling.

He remembered a confession she’d made to him after her first field operation at Tomlin Security. She’d hesitated and almost gotten herself killed just to see what it felt like to be blown up.

“You probably like the sun burning your skin, too,” he added, rubbing some more crumbling dirt off her arms. “In fact, I believe that you enjoy everything that’s been happening to you!”

Tabatha thought for a moment. “You’re right, I think. I never really thought about it. I really don’t mind being here. It’s lonely, and before I found the Praetor, I nearly starved to death.

“But I didn’t mind any of it!” she exclaimed, surprising herself with the realization. “I’m experiencing life at its most extreme. I’m actually happy here!”

“And you can visit me at night,” Jake added, smiling at her.

He didn’t really know if she was telling the truth, or just trying to relieve his anxiety. Perhaps it was some of each.

“But if I’m happy where I am,” teased Tabatha, “why do I need to visit you?”

She moved her hips slightly, letting his growing hard-on slip into the space between her legs, then squeezed her legs together, trapping his beautiful cock between them.

“Oh! Now I remember why…”

Jake laughed and kissed her again. She returned his kiss, gently moving her pelvis back and forth, dry-humping his hard-on. She moaned into his mouth after a few minutes of passionate kissing and rubbing. Jake noticed that his dick was moist, now. He realized she must have already had an orgasm. He found it odd that she hadn’t shared it with him.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was imagining us back home. We’ll probably never get back, will we?”

She sighed, seeming a little depressed.

Jake positioned himself so that he could shove his cock inside her. Gently, he pushed forward. Tabatha opened her eyes for a moment as she realized what he was doing, then smiled at him and closed her eyes again. She opened her mind to him, letting him know how good he felt inside, stretching her where she hadn’t been stretched for a long time.

As he pushed farther in, she moaned and gently arched her back, radiating her pleasure from the small release she’d just had. Jake realized that, physically, she was exhausted from just trying to stay alive. Any orgasms she had tonight were not going to be mindbenders, despite their long separation.

He held her tightly against him, loving how her soft and warm, but very dirty body felt against his as he moved slowly in and out of her. He raised her head and let her rest her cheek on his so she could breathe more easily. It was also easier to kiss her sexy neck in that position.

She still smelled like Tabatha, but he could detect the strong odor of stress. It was an older scent, not the one she was emitting now, but she had been stressed recently; in the past day or so, anyway.

Tabatha was responding to his movements, now, moving her pelvis toward him so that he could get deeper with each thrust. She was also getting wetter down there. What she was radiating seemed to be a nice, long, constant, low-level but very pleasant orgasm.

After a few more moments, Jake began thrusting faster, feeling his own orgasm approaching. Tabatha picked up her pace; her constant, low-level sensations quickly building up into a crescendo of explosive, orgasmic satiation. Her pussy erupted in orgasm, sending waves of ecstasy throughout her body. They radiated on out into Jake’s body as well. Jake’s cock exploded into her soaked pussy, adding his juices to hers and radiating his orgasm back through her.

They came down from their ecstatic heights slowly, holding each other tightly and just feeling each other breathe. Tabatha moaned and moved her head back to look at him. She put one hand on his cheek and smiled at him.

“I love…” she faded.

Jake cried out in anguish as his arm dropped through her fading body. His emotions crashed from complete sensual ecstasy to complete and total misery in just the few seconds it took for Tabatha to fade completely away. He cried out his misery to the empty room, twisting and turning in his sleep as the dream faded away. Then he relaxed into a deeper and more restful sleep than any he’d had since the justices had stolen her away from him.

~~~~~

Elaine lay awake in her life-mate’s arms. Jacob had played for her, then he’d shown her a new set of pipes he was making. One side of the dual-bodied pipes was much smaller than the other. When he’d shown her how it would sound, it made a high, delightful peeping sound, rather than the soft, low, melodious sound of the larger and wider pipes he’d made.

Then they had laughingly, lovingly, had sex together. Even after two hundred years, she still delighted in his company and his lovemaking. She loved his cooking and his talking as well. She’d never known anyone who wanted to talk to her, except for the Bard Geoffrey. And the great bard had been more interested in simply getting her to change her sluttish behavior than he was interested in her as a real person. Jacob had succeeded in making her a one-man woman where Jeff had failed. But, to be fair, Elaine had never loved Jeff – especially not like she loved Jacob. She’d seduced the great bard many times before she met Jacob, and Jacob already knew of her sexual reputation when he’s asked her to be his lifemate.

Tonight, as in many nights before, Elaine lay awake for hours in Jacob’s arms as he slept. Three months ago, she’d had a vision as the goddesses surrounded the little murderess, Tabatha Hedron, preparing to exile her to her home world for destroying the future of her husband’s family and causing the deaths of Béla and Beth, or rather, Lisa. Once she was exiled to earth, in the vision, she would have the opportunity to correct her mistake.

Elaine didn’t understand what the earth girl would do, especially with her powers bound by the image alarm placed in her brain. But the vision only required one thing of the Seeker as she held hands with her sister goddesses and aided in teleporting the murderess to Earth. The murderess needed to be dropped near where Béla had lived when she had been captured, drugged and killed.

Elaine passed the image of the location in her vision along to her sisters, and then they carried out the sentence. The space where the earth girl had stood was suddenly empty. A great cry of anguish echoed throughout the room from a single male throat. Elaine turned and watched as the earth girl’s lifemate dropped to his knees crying out his denial of what he just witnessed. Watching him, she felt no emotion whatsoever. She turned and left the temple.

But every time she saw Hedron now, she still heard that haunting cry. As time passed, and his arduous efforts to seek a reprieve for his exiled wife continued, her conscience bothered her more and more. Her error was in not letting them say goodbye. She and Jacob, her own lifemate, had had their single biggest quarrel ever over that very point.

“If I was him,” Jacob told her, “and it was you trapped and powerless on a dead world, I’d move heaven and hell to get you back. He’s behaving much more civilized that I would. So don’t complain to me that he ‘bothers’ you. It’s your conscience that bothers you, so take it to the justices and see if you can make amends to him!”

That was the only time they’d ever discussed it. After that, Jacob was his pleasant, normal self – perhaps putting a little more effort into pleasing her, which she liked, although it reminded her that Hedron was still missing a lifemate.

Something moved in the ethereal world her mind occupied. Someone was dreamwalking in a nearby building. She recognized the aura. Furious at the murderess’ violation of her exile, she dream-walked out of her body and relocated next to the earth girl. She was quietly sitting on Jake’s bed, seemingly unaware of where she was. Then Jake, entering her dream, sat up and they saw each other.

Elaine’s first impulse was to lash out at the errant girl and cause her to lose track of her location. That would, in effect, slap her back into her body on earth. Something made her hesitate and she listened to the lovers talk.

“The Praetor taught me how to dream-walk,” the hated earth girl was saying.

‘She found the Praetor!’ Elaine realized, astounded.

She looked into the earth girl’s mind and discovered that it had actually called out to her as soon as she was near enough to hear it as it used the last of its stored energy in an attempt to save itself.

‘Why didn’t it call out to me?’ she wondered.

Elaine had searched Béla’s house while it was still standing and not found it. She hadn’t been able to locate it anywhere – almost like it was hiding from her. And it called out to a convicted murderess, instead, two hundred years later.

‘It must have been commanded to respond to her, specifically,’ Elaine realized. ‘But who would have given it a command like that? Everyone who had access was already dead!’

It didn’t matter who had commanded the Praetor, if, indeed, anyone had. The Praetor was the final word in judgement in her society. It had given the murderess access to her dream-walking abilities, altering the girl’s sentence of solitary exile. There was nothing legal that Elaine or any of the other goddesses and justices could do about that.

She returned to her body, leaving the two dream-walking lovers alone. Perhaps finding the lost Praetor was what she was meant to do.

Mentally linking up with the Praetor at university, Elaine accessed its data containing Tabatha’s history and studied it closely. Tabatha, as her earlier self, Katie, was directly responsible for the death of her sister Beth. But in returning Beth to the scene of the detonation that Beth herself had caused, Tabatha, as Katie, saved an entire city from being destroyed.

Her next appearance in the Praetor’s database was several months later, when Béla teleported Katie, now Tabatha, into the bedroom where the Praetor was stored. The Praetor downloaded all of Tabatha’s available memories, as well as Béla’s past memories of her, and transmitted them as historical data to New Eden. Elaine spent the next hour sorting through that data with the Praetor’s help.

From Katie, or rather Tabatha’s suppressed memories, Katie had somehow gotten in close rapport with the earth-bound Praetor and learned about telepathy and teleportation. Somewhere along the line, Katie and Beth met and even became lovers. It was her efforts to help Beth cleanse her soul of the mass murder of Albuquerque that got Beth killed.

Evidently, in the same blast that killed Beth, Katie had been transported, literally blown by the nuclear blast, back into fourth century Italy. There, she met one of the original disciples of her brother, Hank, when he had been called Jesus. According to the Praetor, Katie was instrumental in the continuation of the community of long-lifers, which was involved with what would later become the ‘Lost Scrolls.’

‘Some sort of important religious writings,’ Elaine figured.

After that, Katie basically chased around after Béla for a thousand years until they found each other and shared their memories and abilities. Up until that point in Béla’s existence, Béla had no real abilities. She was somewhat empathic. She couldn’t die, although she often wanted to. That was it. Katie, in essence, showed her how to read other’s minds as well as their emotions, and how to dissipate intense pain and create a sexual ‘high’ from it.

Searching through the downloaded recollections from Béla of that time period, Elaine discovered that Béla was able to survive the tortures of a madman named Torquemada and not go murderously insane as she and all her other sisters had because of what Katie had taught her. Then, hundreds of years later, Béla was able to use her telepathic abilities, also learned from Katie, to save and resurrect them all – all her sisters and her brother, Hank from virtual exile inside a Praetor.

‘None of us would even exist if it weren’t for her!’ Elaine realized.

She was beginning to understand the magnitude of the error of judgement that had occurred because of her grief over her lost sisters.

‘It is determined that she was meant to be here and what has occurred was meant to happen,’ the Praetor informed her.

‘What do you mean?’ Elaine asked.

‘Observe,’ the Praetor replied.

An image from Katie’s memories of moving forward through time, of her meeting the Hurrahs, an extra-dimensional race of ethereal beings, who treated human souls like pets of some sort, and of her entry into her next body.

Elaine was amazed at that memory. In their own society, the Praetors took care of stuff like that, offering dying members of the old race an opportunity to be ‘reborn’ into one of the hybrid bodies waiting in the university lab. She had no idea that there had been an entire race of beings similarly guiding the humans from life to life. She wondered what the Hurrahs were doing now that there were no more humans – on earth, anyway.

‘They probably got bored and went somewhere else to offer their services,’ she decided.

‘Observe,’ the Praetor said again.

An image of Tabatha at thirteen years of age appeared in Elaine's mind. She was worried about her friend. She hadn’t seen Lorraine all day. Something was seriously wrong! She had to find her! But the school officials wouldn’t let her go. Finally, late in the afternoon, she ran all the way to Lori’s house. Her mother wouldn’t let her in, so she went around back and sneaked in through a window, and found her friend dying from self-inflicted injuries. Although she screamed for help, she was too late and Lorraine later died.

In the next image, Tabatha was grown. She was doing recon for an intelligence agency based in Australia. They were hunting for the missing head of a rival agency based in the U.S. Her own agency, Oceanic Civil Intelligence, was very interested in finding and, if possible, rescuing the head of the American-based Tomlin Security.

Remarkably, and for no discernable reason, Tabatha took a short-cut, actually taking the long way around, from Albuquerque to their mobile base in the Painted Desert and passed right over Hedron’s body, left for dead in the desert by Blacker’s agents. The weak transmitter embedded in Hedron’s heel was barely powerful enough to trigger the sensors in her craft as she passed overhead.

‘That’s her lifemate!’ Elaine exclaimed, startled again.

‘That is correct. And once again she was back as a member of the family she had lost, and who had lost her.’

‘What does this all mean?’ Elaine asked. ‘I don’t understand!’

‘As a Seeker,’ the Praetor explained, ‘you have visions that tell you what needs to be done to prevent future catastrophes.’

‘But what I saw in my visions didn’t happen!’ Elaine cried. ‘Everyone’s died! My power is a fraud and a lie! It brings misery and death to those of us who rely on it!’

‘We would probably have to create a new word to describe the type of being that Tabatha Hedron is,’ the Praetor explained. ‘Where you have visions that can correct catastrophes in the future, she moves and corrects catastrophes that have already occurred.’

‘Witness the loss of your brother’s philosophic dissertations, the fact that Béla wasn’t driven insane when she was tortured by Torquemada, the salvation of a city from a nuclear explosion, and finding her family again after rescuing its most valuable member.

‘Something must have happened just before she unknowingly time-walked here. That is what she must prevent. Your sending her to earth has to be part of what must happen in order to correct the error.’

‘When she corrects the error, if she does, how will we know?’ Elaine asked.

‘There is little data concerning what happens during a reality shift – the shift that occurs when something in the past is changed. It has been determined that a ‘wave’ of shifting reality moves forward from the point of change at a finite rate.

‘It is possible to jump from a reality before the wave into the reality after the wave as it passes through time. It is recorded that you yourself will do so to warn your sister and her daughter not to attempt their rescue of Katie from the past. If what happened to you and the Praetor you brought with you into the new reality is normal, then you will find yourself and everything that changes dissolving. It was very painful for you. But, if it occurs again, you will not remember this reality. You will have lived your entire existence in the reality that ‘overwrites’ this one.

‘The only other person who jumped from one reality to another was Tanya Tabor. She was teleporting at the instant when the reality shift from Katie-alive to Katie-dead occurred. The change nearly drove her insane, but she survived, evidently because she teleported into where she would have been anyway. Oddly enough, her husband, Frank, didn’t remember the alternate reality at all. No one understands why, but the images of the alternate reality were never in his mind, even as dreams.’

‘That must be the wrongness I constantly feel,’ Elaine theorized, feeling more hopeful than she’d felt in two centuries! ‘I’m living in the wrong reality!’

Elaine disconnected from her Praetor. She was exhausted, but excited, and wanted to check on her unwanted university data organizer. Hedron was asleep, alone. Dropping her head back down on her pillow, the Golden Goddess left him and fell asleep, more content now than she had been for many years.

Chapter 11 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Béla screamed and arched her back against her restraints. She went limp as the commander calmly flipped a switch, shutting off the electricity that coursed through her restraints and into her tiny frame.

She hung, exhausted and gasping. Sweat was pouring off her abused body. The strange headpiece from the Klingon face kit glued to her head was half melted from the voltage of the electric shocks. Béla raised her eyes beyond the stage, trying to focus on the undulating mass of people staring at her, radiating their lust at her as they fucked each other in frenzy.

Béla suddenly screamed again, arching her back in orgasmic agony as the commander flipped the switch back on. She was in full pain-dissipation mode, and was coming constantly as electricity coursed through her shaking body. Then it was gone again.

“You know what I want to hear,” the commander said quietly to her. “Tell me the names of your hidden agents and their locations.”

“Fuck you,” Béla gasped.

She didn’t know the script, and she really didn’t believe anyone cared how accurate it was so long as they could watch her being tortured.

The commander picked up an assassins’ dagger – a Klingon weapon – a woman’s weapon, and walked over in front of the Klingon girl strapped to the upright metal girders. He ran the knife blade up and down her exquisite, sweating, trembling body.

The heavy single-pieced leather armor she wore appeared to be handcrafted to fit her. In actuality, she had stood on a square while a metal box dropped down and, using her body as a mold, sprayed the armor on her. The single piece of leather armor started at one hip, flared up to cover her breast, went around her neck and down over the other breast, ending at her other hip.

It was completely open in the middle, exposing the entire front of her chest, belly and pelvis. Evidently, the armor designers had decided that cutting a Klingon girl’s tits was a big no-no, but slicing her in half lengthwise with a Klingon battleaxe was okay. In addition, there were numerous openings in the sprayed-on leather to display the roundness of her breasts.

Béla warily watched the commander as he held the knife. She knew he was going to stick it into her somewhere, but she didn’t know where. All that lovely electricity and the orgasms she’d had were scrambling her empathic abilities.

The commander continued caressing his prisoner’s bare belly and pelvis with the knife. Then he laid it against one of the openings displaying her rounded breasts pressed beneath the leather. He pushed the knife in though the slot in her armor and was rewarded with a whimpering cry from his victim. Blood ran from the wound beneath her armor, trickled down onto her hip and on down her leg. Some of the people watching radiated orgasmic pleasure at her as they came inside of or against whomever they were fucking.

Béla’s body was still trembling slightly from the electricity as she watched her tormentor retrieve another knife from his desk.

“No! Please!” she pleaded, believing it was expected of her.

He unceremoniously shoved the knife into her other breast. Now both of her hips and legs were decorated with little rivers of blood. More orgasms were occurring in the audience.

“Then tell me what I want to know!” the commander commanded. He sounded very authoritarian. He almost casually picked up an iron spike and a hammer.

He pounded his fist against the electric switch again, flooding her body with more electricity. Béla arched and shook and screamed. He shut it off, again.

“Talk!” he snarled at her.

“No!” she spit at him, breathless and trembling.

It was getting personal, now. She wasn’t just acting anymore. She needed that spike inside her, however he planned on putting it there.

He held the spike up against her belly and looked at her. She spit at him, again. He hit the spike with the hammer, driving it into her bare belly, just below her ribs.

Béla gurgled and threw blood up on him. It was calculated that there was nothing vital where the spike had entered her body. On a human, that would have been true. On Béla, he ruptured her central digestive core and she threw up acidic blood all over him.

The actor playing the commander screamed, blinded by her digestive fluids. His face was burning! He staggered around, then fell off the stage. Béla hung limp on the girders with two knives in her breasts and a spike stuck into her bleeding stomach. The crowd went wild.

The medic found the actor on the floor and tranquilized him with his needle gun, making him much more pliable. One of the stage handlers led him away to the waiting ambulance.

The medic climbed up on the stage and walked toward Béla hanging on the girders.

“No drugs,” she gasped as he approached.

He looked at her hanging there, gasping and choking on her own blood with the knives and the spike still stuck in her.

“You could die from shock,” he told her.

She wearily shook her head. “No drugs,” she repeated. She coughed again, but at least this time she didn’t spatter anyone with her digestive fluids. “And I have my own doctor. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Pain freak, huh?” he asked her.

She grinned slightly and nodded weakly.

“Okay, have it your way…” He turned and walked off the stage.

The stage handlers approached now, preparing to take her out to meet her admirers. Although the girders were fake, they were still heavy. One of the handlers had to go get a pair of anti-grav plates to put under the lower end. Then Béla was lowered down off the stage, still strapped to the girders. People began gathering around to jack off on her.

“What! Nobody wants to fuck me?” she asked, breathing heavily to control her orgasmic sensations and gazing at her admirers half deliriously. “After all that suffering, the least you can do is give me a good pounding…”

For the next hour, Béla lay strapped to the girders leaning on the edge of the stage with the two knives still in her breasts and the spike in her belly, while over thirty men surrounded and fucked her or jacked off onto her wounded belly and leather costume.

One person wanted to pull the spike out and fuck her there, but Jake prevented him from pulling it out of her. With that much cum available for regeneration, the wound would have healed over before the guy could have gotten his cock into it.

“Sure,” Jake said, understanding that they were invoking their purchased ownership privileges, now.

He reached up and pulled the leather strap around her wrist loose, then undid the leg on his side while Nick did the same on her other side.

Then Nick gently pulled the knife out of her breast armor and pulled the armor back to inspect her wound. Béla looked at Jake nervously, surprised that he wasn’t putting his foot down and being more protective of her secrets.

‘My brain’s so fried I don’t know if I can do it!’ Béla replied in his mind, her presence feeling weak and uncertain.

Then Béla put her attention on her wound, which was rapidly closing. She began teleporting particles of her regenerating skin deep into her own central core to be digested. After a moment, her body got the idea and stopped regenerating there. She was able to do the same thing with her other breast and the wound in her belly from the spike, although that one was harder to control. Her body didn’t want that hole there. Every few minutes, she had to ‘clean it out’ again.

“It’s too bad the commander fell off the stage,” Nova said, animatedly. “I would’ve been great to see you hanging from the ceiling with that hook in your cunt!”

“Well, maybe next time, sweetie,” Béla said weakly. “What do you want to do with me?”

“We wanted to fuck your wounded cunt, of course!” she said, excitedly. “I still want to rub my clit against your torn tummy! I want to eat all that cum out of you while I finger that hole in your tummy! Then I want to sit on your face while Nick fucks the shit out of you!”

Béla sighed weakly and closed her eyes, knowing how an injured human would respond without drugs. Nick was annoyed with her.

“Why didn’t you let the medic drug you?” he complained. “You’d feel a more receptive right now. You might even feel horny!”

Béla did feel horny. She loved listening to what the little slut Nova had wanted to do to her. But she also had to hide her non-human abilities.

“I’ve got something for her,” Jake volunteered. “This is what I usually use on her when she’s hurting.”

He pulled out a small dispenser from his pocket.

‘That’s a tic-tac!’ Béla thought at him, doing her best not to laugh in front of all of them.

‘They don’t know that,’ he replied in her mind. ‘It’s too dark in here to see much.’

Jake took the little white tablet out and dropped it into Béla’s open mouth.

“Don’t chew, just swallow,” he suggested.

‘Why can’t I chew it?’ she whined in his head. ‘I like tic-tacs!’

‘Because, silly, the smell on your breath will give it away!’ Jake explained in her head. ‘So, swallow!’

‘I already did! Do you really believe I couldn’t figure that out?’ Béla laughed in his mind. ‘That’s a neat idea about training my body not to heal until I want it to, though.’

‘Glad you like it,’ Jake replied in her head. ‘The ‘drug’ should start kicking in anytime, now.’

Béla visibly relaxed, then smiled. She dreamily turned her head toward her auction owners.

“Did you say something about sitting on my face?” she asked.

Her eyes were glazed with lust, now. That was real. She didn’t have to fake it.

“Lie down, darling,” Nova said, putting her hand on Béla’s breastbone and pushing. She climbed up on the platform with Béla and, straddling her, began kissing her face and cheeks while she rubbed her pussy against the wound in Béla’s stomach. Béla ‘cleaned’ it once again, letting it bleed on Nova’s pussy hairs.

“Nicky,” Nova asked, looking over at him, “Would you like to fuck her here? This feels wonderful! All nice and sticky and everything!”

Nick had a raging hard-on from watching the show and watching her being gang raped afterwards. Ever since he and Nova decided to redeem their hour tonight instead of next week, he’d badly wanted to stick it to Béla, preferably in that wound in her stomach. At his wife’s suggestion that he do just that, he grinned, feeling his dick grow even harder.

Jake stood back and watched, reminding Béla to keep the wound open with her mind so it wouldn’t grow closed around Nick’s dick while she was being fucked there.

Nova climbed up the table and sat her sticky cunt down on Béla’s face.

Béla stuck her tongue out and tasted her own blood between Nova’s legs. Deciding she liked it, Béla dug her tongue in between Nova’s pussy lips, discovering that Nick had already left a little something in there.

‘He hasn’t pumped much semen into her,’ Béla thought as she contentedly licked away. ‘Maybe he has a prostate problem.’

“Lick my clit, bitch,” Nova ordered.

Béla had gotten so interested in getting all of Nick’s cum as it dripped out that she forgot about Nova’s needs. She moved slowly up toward her master’s hard little nub, brushing it once or twice with her nose as she approached it. Nova snarled in frustration and reached down, pulling on Béla’s hair. In return, Béla bit her, drawing blood from her cunt lips.

“Ow!” Nova yelped. “She bit me!”

Then Béla had her mouth, and teeth, around Nova’s clitoris. She sucked hard and rapidly flicked her tongue over the tough little piece of meat in her mouth. Nova squashed her belly down against Béla’s head, trying to get more of her cunt into Béla’s mouth.

Nova trembled and twitched as she came. Béla kept chewing and flicking her tongue on Nova’s sweet pussy meat.

Béla shuddered as Nick shoved his dick into her stomach wound. He seemed to have trouble getting it in until Béla remembered to ‘clean’ the wound once again. Then his hard cock practically fell into her stomach muscles. Béla shuddered again as she felt the strange sensation of being fucked in the stomach. She seemed to recall it happening once before, but she couldn’t quite remember it.

“Yes! Do that again!” Nick commanded. “Tighten your stomach muscles!”

He rammed his cock into her, causing her to twitch involuntarily. Béla cried out into his wife’s cunt, remembering that these two thought they were torturing a human, not getting an alien vampire girl off.

‘What would a human girl do under these circumstances?’ she wondered, hoping that she wasn’t giving anything away.

Nova was coming constantly, now, as she felt Béla’s body jerk with the force of her husband’s fucking that wounded belly. It excited her to know that this beautiful girl beneath her was getting her guts torn up by Nick’s hard cock. Then Nova twitched a little too far in her orgasms and fell of the platform. She lay on the floor, howling and holding her hands between her legs.

“Oh, God! She bit off my pussy!” Nova cried, holding her hands between her legs. “I’m hurt! I’m hurt! Oh, God! Help me!” Jake ran around the platform to see what was wrong with Nova. Her husband Nick was too busy coming in Béla’s belly to pay any attention to his wife.

Béla could feel Nick’s hard cock digging deeper into her body. She tightened her stomach muscles around him, trying to keep him from going any deeper, but Nick was determined to drill right through her. As he came, he gave one mighty shove, rupturing his way through the last thin wall of muscle tissue protecting his dick from her acidic central core.

He pumped his semen directly into her digestive system while Béla madly created a wall of tissue around his dick like a fish skin or a condom to protect his sensitive cock from her digestive fluids. Nick only noticed a slight, stinging sensation around his cock as he sat straddling her torso, gasping for breath.

“She's all right,” Jake said, interrupting them both.

“What?” both Béla and Nick asked.

Béla was still distracted, needing to continually add material from other parts of her body to the protective surface around Nick’s dick as that protective layer kept being digested. Béla wondered for a moment why her digestive system would digest her own tissue, then realized that, as she teleported each layer of muscle tissue between the invading cock in her belly and her central core, she was damaging her own cells. Damaged cells were always consumed for regeneration. That was how she stayed so young.

“Get off me, you lunk!” Béla exclaimed, pushing Nick off just as the last layer of tissue protecting his dick dissolved.

“I’ve still got a half hour left, slave!” Nick snarled down at her. “Now I’m going to fuck you in the holes in your tits!”

Oh, fuck! Béla thought in disgust. I forgot about those and let them heal!

Jake! I’m blowing my cover here! Béla cried out in his mind. Help!

Nick was reaching forward and had grabbed her left breast, brutally shoving his fingers around in the blood searching for the knife wound.

“Hey, buddy!” Jake called out at him. “Don’t you think you should check on your wife? I think she has a concussion.”

“She’ll live!” Nick said callously, mauling Béla’s breast.

Béla’s only choice now was to teleport the healed tissue into her central core for digestion, recreating the knife wound in her tit. Even as the thought occurred to her, she went ahead and did it, wincing in pain as rough fingers found freshly torn raw nerves.

“Ah, there it is!” Nick gloated triumphantly. “It’s smaller than I thought. It’ll make a great vagina!”

He slid up her sticky, bloody torso, pumping his hardening dick furiously with one hand. Béla cried out as Nick callously shoved his hard cock into her soft breast tissue. He went in a lot deeper than the knife had, cruelly tearing through the soft, fatty tissue of her breast. Béla held both hands over her tiny breast, trying to hold its shape while Nick rammed his much larger cock in and out of it.

Nick grinned down at her as he noticed tears running down her face.

“What’s the matter, bitch?” he growled at her in his lust. “Drugs wearing off?”

Gritting his teeth, he began fucking her torn breast even harder. Béla was crying, now. Then Nick was coming, shoving his cock into her so hard he was almost pulling her breast right off her body. Béla was screaming, and holding her breast down as hard as she could. Then it was over. He’d practically torn his way completely through.

Béla lay on the platform, whimpering in quiet agony. Nick pulled out of her and gazed at his handiwork. He couldn’t tell that Béla’s stomach wound had healed beneath the blood crusted over on her belly.

“I return this slave to you,” Nick announced grandly. “She was incredible! I look forward to fucking her scars.”

“I’m glad you liked her,” Jake said, stepping forward.

The blow came up directly underneath Nick’s jaw, breaking it in half and smashing his teeth together, chipping several. Completely knocked out, Nick fell backward, stiff as a board. His head hit a chair, cracking his skull.

Jake reached down and lifted Béla off the table. “Are you all right?” he asked her, her face inches from his own. She nodded, her eyes still wet.

‘I don’t like this place,’ Jake heard her cry in his mind. ‘I don’t like these people. They’re sick inside. Their minds and souls are degraded. I want to go home.’

Jake carried her toward one of the private rooms. When they were finally out of sight of any prying eyes, Béla teleported them into their bedroom.

Jake laid her down on the bed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s always been fun before. We don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to,” Béla whispered. “What they do to each other – that’s not sex, it’s just cruel! I didn’t understand before. They’re all trying to die and they’re afraid to admit it.”

“Do you feel that way when I do stuff to you?” Jake asked, concerned.

“No, of course I don’t,” Béla told him. “You do it because you know what I like, and you like to do it to me. What they were doing was trying to hurt me as much as they could. None of them cared if I liked it. They didn’t want me to like it!”

Béla needed Jake’s body against hers right now. She held out her arms and projected her need to him. Jake smiled and dropped down next to her, wrapping his arms around her sweaty, smelly, cum-covered body. Béla sighed happily and kissed him.

She opened her mind, letting him feel her hunger for him. She wanted him to make love to her, now, while she was all messy with the dried cum and blood on her. She also stank of smoke from her electrocution on the stage. The combination was the most erotic scent Jake had ever smelled on her.

“How did you keep Nick’s dick from dissolving inside you like everything else does?” Jake asked, kissing Béla’s neck. “I would have loved to see him pull out a bleeding stub and screaming his ass off!”

“It wasn’t easy,” Béla replied, trying to get her hand down between Jake’s belly and his jeans. “I had to keep teleporting tissue in there to protect his dick from my digestive juices.”

“You can do that?” Jake asked. “Well, of course you can! You did!”

He yelped in surprise as Béla, frustrated with her inability to slip her tiny hand down his tight jeans, teleported his pants off him. They fell to the floor somewhere behind him. He moaned his pleasure into her mouth as she stroked his hardening cock with her fingers.

“Fuck me now?” she asked in her please-fuck-me baby voice.

Jake grinned down at her. “Front or back?” he asked, know how she loved him in her ass as well as in her cunt.

“Stop asking questions and stick it in!” Béla exclaimed, her frustration increasing. “You know what I like! You always know what I like!”

She spread her legs, arching her back and pressing her pelvis toward him.

Jake shoved into her wet, sticky cunt, squishing into the thick goo left from her gang rape. His cock was completely coated with slippery gobs of cum. He began stroking powerfully in and out of her, getting even harder because of the marvelous fullness of her squishy pussy. He needed to shove his cum-coated cock into her ass. He needed to rupture it and make her scream in both agony and ecstasy while he reamed her with his slippery, cum-coated cock.

Béla, feeling his change of pace, realized he was about to change holes. She felt him withdraw completely from her loose, still-hungry pussy and raised her hips, making her asshole more available for him. She felt his cock slipping up and down her ass, searching madly. Then, finding the entrance to its new home, it dove happily inside her, violently stretching her splincter muscle more quickly than what it was used to.

She cried out, coming as he stretched, ripped into, and violated her ass. He pulled out almost all the way, then plunged back into her, making her come again. Her quivering, convulsing pussy muscles were pushing cum out of her overfilled cunt. It flowed down toward her ass, coating his cock and balls, making her anal entrance more slippery and easier for him to slide in and out.

Jake, noticing the increasing looseness of her ass, pounded her harder and harder. Béla began radiating her orgasms through him, making it harder for him to concentrate on not coming in her ass. Finally she clenched his cock with her ass muscles and arched high in the air, broadcasting her overpowering orgasm through him, then collapsed onto the bed.

He pulled out of her, so close to coming that his cock was leaking. He rubbed his hand against her come-filled cunt, gathering even more of the evening’s pleasure in the palm of his hand, and rubbed it on his cock.

“Open your mouth, babe,” he whispered hoarsely, “and taste the pleasure of all the men who’ve fucked you tonight.”

He crawled up the bed while he spoke, then arrived with his knees next to her head.

“Huh?” Béla whispered, barely conscious.

She could smell the intoxicating aroma of cum all over Jake’s cock. She tried to smile her pleasure as she opened her mouth to receive him, but his cock entered and filled her mouth, interrupting her smile.

Béla closed her mouth around the wonderful taste of all that cum coating her darling’s hard cock. She sucked and swallowed, trying to get it all off, then opened her mouth to suck more of him in, wanting to taste more of that wonderful cum coating his cock and balls. This was why she went to that stupid club – so she could enjoy the superior sex she always got from Jake after she was used and abused by the degraded assholes that seemed to cover the earth these days.

Then Jake was coming in her mouth, his cock muscles jerking with his pleasure and filling her mouth with his cum. She moaned, remembering not to breathe while she swallowed again and again, swallowing what seemed to be a never-ending stream of cum pumping out of Jake’s glorious cock. She was nearly passing out from lack of air, but she didn’t care. She was determined not to breathe in, not to choke on his gift to her. Finally, her throat was clear enough to take a breath.

Jake pulled out and lay down next to his magnificent wife, listening to her rapid breathing, that tiny whimper of exhausted pleasure that occurred with each exhalation. He couldn’t keep his hands and mouth off her sticky, bloody, cum covered body. He slid down a little, pulled her sticky belly tightly against his chest, and began sucking on her nipples.

Béla moaned her pleasure to him as Jake brought her back from near unconsciousness and wrapped her arms around his head, pushing more of her breast into his mouth. He sucked harder, a little annoyed that she had taken control away from him. She seemed to realize her error and relaxed her grip, although what she really wanted was to be bitten on her breasts.

None of her sisters would have any qualms at all about tearing happily into Béla’s tiny breasts with their sharp little teeth. She wanted Jake to do that, now. But Jake wanted to love, kiss, suck on, and worship her breasts – not just tear into them with his dull human teeth.

She reached back and recalled a time when Beth was mauling her breasts and biting her. Her body responded to her fantasy and another orgasm flooded into her belly and out though Jake. Jake stopped sucking for a moment, then bit down hard on her tender nipple, almost breaking the skin. Béla cried out and bucked into the air, her mild orgasm exploding ten fold through her belly and breasts, through Jake and back into her.

Then Jake was fucking her again – angry, hard, cruel, taking her whether she wanted taken or not. She did, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Then Béla was in the throes of another series of continuous orgasms, each one building on the last until she was arching into the air, holding them both off the bed, screaming and coming. She felt Jake’s orgasm radiate through her body, or maybe it was one of hers, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t care. They were both coming. She collapsed back down onto the bed, completely unconscious.

Jake dropped down beside her, surprised by his reaction to her broadcast fantasy. He would have loved being with Béla and Beth in that strange forest in space. But even in the throes of her fantasy, he felt it necessary to claim Béla as his own; to take her without hesitation.

He knew that when Béla wanted something, she didn’t hesitate to reach for it. In her mind, to hesitate was to lose. Jake didn’t hesitate to take her when she reached for Beth in her mind. He wasn’t about to lose her to a dead sister or a phantom lover.

He wasn’t surprised that she didn’t want to go to the club anymore. After the first few meetings, he thought she was learning to enjoy it. Those people were interested in ‘sensation at any price’. That was why he introduced her to that life style in the first place. He thought that, with her love for physical mutilation, she might fit in with them. But their fascination with bodily disfigurement frightened her. She couldn’t be disfigured, no matter what anyone did to her. These people threatened her secret. And now, she couldn’t go back. They would expect scars from tonight’s performance, and there were none.

The bed jumped slightly, then began to rock. The whole house was gently rocking back and forth.

‘An earthquake in Boston?’ Jake asked himself.

Béla screamed and bolted upright in the bed, holding her head with both hands. She screamed again, then collapsed back down onto her pillow, gasping. Her eyes were dilated and she was covered with a thin sheen of slippery fresh sweat.

“Are you alright?” Jake asked, frightened for her.

She didn’t respond. Whatever had shaken the house had hit Béla a lot harder. He needed to find out what she’d reacted to.

“Honey, it’s Jake,” he said quietly, shaking her shoulder. “Do you know where you are?”

She’d been through a lot tonight. It was possible that this was some aftermath of being electrocuted earlier.

“Béla,” Jake crooned into her ear. He was starting to get worried, now. She didn’t seem to hear him. He got out of bed and lifted her up into a sitting position. “Come on, honey! Wake up!”

He kissed her gently on one cheek and smacked her gently on the other. She made a sound in her throat. Jake held his wife at an arms length and looked at her. She blinked several times, then seemed to focus on his face.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, looking confused.

“You were the one screaming, you tell me,” Jake replied quietly, more nervous than he cared to admit.

“Was I asleep?” Béla asked, staring at him. “I must have been dreaming.”

“Do you remember what it was?” he asked. “What were you dreaming about?”

“I… I don’t remember,” she murmured. “The sun… it was so hot. And it hurt, inside my head. Worse than it ever did before. It hurt. I remember screaming now. I’m sorry I frightened you. It was just a dream.”

“Dreams don’t shake the whole house, and they don’t make your skin that hot,” Jake replied. “The only thing I know that’s ever made your skin that hot was Lisa, when you were carrying her.”

“Don’t blame my dreams on our daughter!” Béla exclaimed, her mind working better now. “She won’t even be back until Wednesday! At least, that’s what the Praetor told me.”

Both Jake and Béla took a couple of deep breaths, collecting their thoughts.

“Where’s that light coming from?” Béla asked, looking past Jake’s face and through the bedroom door into the hallway.

There was a greenish glow coming from downstairs. It flashed occasionally, like lightning.

“Jesus! There must be a fire!” Jake said, quickly putting on a pair of jeans.

Béla reached for something in her closet to put on, too.

“Why didn’t the security system warn us?” Béla cried out.

“I don’t know,” Jake said, already heading out the bedroom door.

Béla teleported directly downstairs into the middle of the living room. It was like teleporting into a tornado. She opened her eyes. She was lying on the bedroom floor where she’d been standing. She teleported again. The same thing happened, but this time, she rematerialized several feet above the bedroom floor and fell.

“Are you coming?” Jake called out from the stairwell.

Badly shaken, Béla got up and walked unsteadily into the hallway. Jake waited, noticing her lack of coordination as she nearly went over the railing, head first.

“Béla!” he shouted at her.

She grabbed the railing and pushed back toward the wall, staggering. Then Jake was with her, holding her, protecting her from whatever it was that threatened them. A bright light lit up the downstairs area. It lasted about fifteen seconds, then it was gone. Jake and Béla, their hands clasped together in a death grip, moved slowly down the stairway. They were almost to the bottom when the house shook again like it had before.

Both Béla and Jake huddled against the wall on the stairway for the thirty seconds it took for the shaking to stop. Then they looked into the living room. It was brightly lit. The light was coming from the sky. It was daylight at three a.m. in the living room and there was no roof.

Amazed, Béla started to walk into the living room. She pressed against something soft that wouldn’t let her through. She recognized that this was what she’d tried to teleport through. Since she wasn’t teleporting, it wasn’t hurtling her out. She pushed harder against the softness. It sprang back, pushing her away.

Snarling in frustration, Béla leapt into the living room. She landed on the stairway, having knocked Jake to the side as she was flung back out.

“At three in the morning?” Jake asked. He looked. His mouth dropped open. “Where’s the roof? Why do the walls look like that? God! It raining in there!”

“What?” Béla asked, picking herself up and coming back to stand next to Jake.

She looked more closely. There were millions of drops of rain suspended in the air a few inches in front of her. She focused on one, trying to understand. It was moving very slowly. She watched it gracefully travel down through the air, surprised at all the little ripples that occurred in its surface as it traveled down and exploded against the floor.

She watched another raindrop do the same thing. “This is amazing! Everything’s going in slow motion!”

She looked excitedly at Jake. Jake was still staring with his mouth open.

Then he moved, heading for the staircase. “I’ve got to record this!” he exclaimed as he disappeared up the stairs.

A moment later he was back. He dragged a chair over to the entrance of the living room, set the recorder on it and pressed a button.

“Computer record!” he commanded the wall console.

“Recording,” the console replied.

Béla felt along the wall. “We can’t reach the front door! We can’t get out!”

“Relax, Hon,” Jake said excitedly. “We can go out the back way. Let’s watch for a while and try to figure out what’s going on, okay?”

Béla nodded nervously. They stood, hugging each other across the top of the chair holding the recorder. The rain seemed to be stopping.

“I didn’t know rain stopped like that,” Béla said, watching what seemed to be a solid wall of raindrops suddenly cut off evenly across the top.

As the ‘ceiling’ of raindrops continued downward, objects began to appear in the room that were previously invisible because of the slow moving rain.

Ruined, tumbledown walls seemed to be superimposed against the normal walls of the living room. What furniture was there seemed the same, though not much was there. A tabletop appeared above the slowly descending raindrops. An old towel covered something on the table.

“That’s my towel!” Béla exclaimed.

She teleported to the bathroom and returned a few seconds later, holding a towel identical to the one a few feet away from her in the brightly lit living room. But the most extraordinary thing in that room was a figure that seemed to be made out of mud. It was about five feet high and holding its hands up in the air, as though it was shielding itself against something.

‘Probably all that rain…’

“Who’s that?” Jake asked. “Looks like an aborigine.”

“Yes it does, doesn’t it?” Béla agreed, staring at the figure in the middle of her living room.

“Who are you?” she called out.

Then mentally, she tried to reach the person a few feet away from her.

‘Who are you? Why are you here?’

There was nothing to connect to.

‘There’s no one there!’ she realized.

“It’s some kind of illusion,” Béla remarked to Jake, “like a reflection in a mirror. I can’t contact her.”

“You’re sure it’s a ‘her’?” Jake asked, looking more closely.

“Well, it looks female,” Béla said. “Look at those flaired hips and that thin waist.”

“Yeah! She looks hot, all covered with mud like that,” he grinned as Béla elbowed him in the ribs. “Watch the recorder, babe.”

‘Praetor, please explain what’s happening here,’ Béla thought into the air around her.

There was no response.

‘Praetor?’

“Praetor? Where are you?” she asked, out loud.

Then she remembered. ‘It’s in the living room!’

“Oh, god! The Praetor’s in there!” she cried.

“Where?” Jake asked.

They both watched as the last of the rain slowly hit the floor and, just as slowly, bounced back up, rebounding off the floor into empty air above it. For a moment, the lower half of the room seemed covered in fine mist.

“There!” Béla exclaimed, pointing. Her finger hit the softness of the force field again. “In all that water! It’ll short out!”

“What’s all that stuff on the floor?” Jake asked. “It looks like the roof has fallen in or something.”

“That makes sense,” Béla agreed. “There’s no ceiling… and those are clouds up there.”

They stared at the primitive mud girl standing in the middle of the room for another minute.

“Okay, think!” Jake said, finally. “This is obviously a hologram or something. What technology can produce a force field that isn’t electrical in nature?”

He poked it with his finger. It pushed his finger back out exactly as hard as he had pushed it in. He did it a couple more times.

“Weird,” Béla said. “Look! She moved!”

Jake stared at the aborigine girl again. Her arms had changed position slightly, as though she was lowering them in extremely slow motion.

“This is going to be one hell of a recording!” Jake said, almost to himself.

It took almost twenty minutes for the primitive girl to lower her arms down and grab the towel. She pulled it off the table, revealing what it had been protecting from the rain.

“Two Praetors?” Béla interrupted, finishing his sentence for him. “Yes. I can, too.” I also see two walls – one standing and one in ruins. If you squint against the light coming in, you can see the living room ceiling. It’s still there! It’s just… transparent. Just like the girl and just like the Praetor on the table.

“Everything that there are two of,” explained Béla, “is transparent.”

“Then there must be two girls,” extrapolated Jake. “So, where’s the other one?”

“That’s not what I mean,” Béla said, sounding a little exasperated. “Everything that’s different about the room is transparent. The walls, that Praetor on the table, that girl, whoever she is. Whatever is different between our living room and that living room is transparent. They are co-existing in the same space. And that’s impossible!”

“Well, okay,” Jake said, more thoughtfully now. “So, what do we do now?”

“That first night,” he said, “when Juan stabbed you. How come it didn’t leave a scar?”

“You’re just now wondering about that?” Lisa asked. She moved slightly, ungluing her leg, which had been resting on his torso. “You saw how I healed when that Verdugo guy shot me. Why would a knife wound be any different?”

“Yeah, but none of your wounds leave a scar,” Mac replied. “How come? When normal people get injured, there’s always a scar, even after it heals.”

He heard her sigh again. This time she sounded less pleased, perhaps a little frustrated.

“You could just show me, like you did that other thing,” he suggested. “With your mind, you know?”

She had been lying with him, sharing her sensations and her emotions with him since they’d made love a little earlier. She didn’t generally share, and wasn’t now sharing, the images in her mind with him. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to – but if he started browsing around and found her memories of her sister (now her mom) and their sexual exploits in the arborium of that spaceship, she would be answering inane questions until one of them died of old age.

Besides, she’d only recently begun to remember her earlier life and her spotty recollections were still jumbled around in her head. She didn’t understand a lot of it, herself.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you,” Mac sighed.

Lisa knew that little game. If his fascination with her couldn’t get her to talk, making her feel guilty for rejecting him should. It did, despite the fact that she knew what he was doing.

“I seduced her! All right?” Lisa snapped at him. “Happy now?”

“Yeah, sure! No, of course not!” Macario said, trying to catch up with her sudden mood change. “I just wanted to know. Does your dad know?”

“I seduced him, too,” Lisa replied, feigning indifference as she sat up and closely inspected her nails in the dark.

“So…” Mac mused. “I wasn’t your first.”

“What?” Lisa said, “Yes! You were my first! Your horny little pecker was the first I’d ever had inserted in me. Jeez!”

“But you seduced your own dad?” Mac asked. “How can I be your first if you did that?”

“I used my mouth and he used his fingers,” Lisa exclaimed. “He didn’t fuck me, I’m his daughter, for crying out loud!”

“You wanted him to?” he asked, morbidly curious. “Don’t get mad – I just want to know.”

“I’m not mad!” Lisa fumed, furious. “You just ask so many questions!”

“I just want to know all about you,” he explained. “I love you!”

“Yes, you do, don’t you,” Lisa sighed. “Fool that you are…”

“Probably,” he agreed. He pulled her back down to him. “So, why’d you leave home?”

“To find you, asshole,” she said, then kissed his nose.

“Really?” he asked.

“No,” Lisa said, smiling and squirming as he held her tightly against him.

“I left to find myself,” she said, haughtily. “I left to explore the world – to discover what there was to be discovered. I just happened to run into you before I got very far.”

“How far did you get?” he asked.

“I spent the first night here, alone, freezing my ass off on this dumb beach,” she told him. “The next night I spent getting kidnapped, butt-fucked, stabbed, royally gang-banged, and stomped on, in that order.”

“So I was your first!” he said, teasing her.

She bit him.

“Ow!” he yelped.

In the last few hours since the sun went down on their first day together, he’d found out something about his little vampire-phoenix-sex goddess. She was ticklish. He began tickling her ribs and armpits now to get her to release her teeth from his chin.

“Yike!” she squealed.

Then they were rolling around, wrestling with each other and laughing. In only a few seconds, they were covered with sand, having rolled off the blanket they’d recovered from Juan’s beach paraphernalia.

Some of the stuff they found when they returned to the ‘scene of the crime’, as it were, they torched – stuff like the bags of coke and weed. Lisa vaporized them in such heat that there wasn’t even any residue to sniff. There was a considerable collection of credit chips and some clothes, a tent and a couple of blankets.

Macario divided the stuff up among the others – young boys like himself who had been persuaded to serve Juan Verdugo the same way he had. The young fellows were amazed that Lisa had survived his treatment and had actually caused the disappearance of Juan and his stomping sex partner. The evil pair had sodomized some of them and even threatened their lives, along with the lives of their loved ones and family members to coerce them into serving him.

They partied, treating Lisa like their savior, which she was, she supposed. But she managed to get them to settle for allowing her and Macario some privacy on this, their very first night together as a couple. Although most of them had taken their turns holding her down and raping her the night before, they were more than willing for Macario to be her prize tonight, her ‘gift’ for coming to their rescue.

The wrestling match ended with Lisa trapped beneath Macario with his tongue deep in her mouth and hands no longer fiendishly tickling her but gently squeezing her breasts and caressing her.

“Huh? Oh, she didn’t do anything,” Lisa replied. “She was part of a task force that was sent someplace to shut down some drug dealers. She was captured and they drowned her. They chained her in a glass tank in the middle of the stage. Then they filled it full of water. They thought it was funny watching her struggle.”

“What? Oh. No,” Lisa explained. “She's fine. They didn’t kill her. They just thought they did. Then one of them spotted me and started shooting at me.”

“What happened after that?” Mac asked.

“I blew everything up – the guy who shot at me, the glass tank on the stage. I fired up everything else. Only a few made it out alive,” she shuddered, remembering. “I don’t like to kill.”

She sighed at stared up into the night sky. They lay on the sand for awhile. Lisa stared into the Northern Lights. Macario drew designs in the sand that adhered to her breasts and belly. After a while, he’d managed to get most of it off her. He looked at her beautiful face, her rounded nose, her narrow chin. She seemed subdued, watching the lights dance in the sky – almost sad, somehow.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they,” he murmured into her ear.

“What?” she asked, seeming to come out of a trance.

She blinked and looked at him, waiting for him to say something.

“The Northern Lights,” he said quietly, clarifying what he meant. “The Aurora Borealis. They didn’t used to be visible unless you were in Northern Canada, or somewhere harsh and freezing cold. But now, they sing in the sky for anyone who wants to watch – and listen.”

“They sing of death,” Lisa said coldly. “The end of humankind. One day they will own the sky, but no one will be alive by then. You will have all died.”

“Such sad words,” Macario replied, touching her lips, “from such a beautiful mouth. How can you know such a terrible thing?”

“You are a hopeless romantic!” she exclaimed.

But she smiled at him when she said it.

“And you are a child,” he replied, “with the power of a god, or perhaps, a goddess. And you have stolen my soul from me.”

Lisa laughed and kissed him again. “My mother will steal you from me, I’m certain. She is even prettier than I am.”

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” he quietly proclaimed, “and I see only you!”

Macario began kissing her nipples. Lisa lay back and enjoyed his tongue and mouth on her.

‘Praetor, can you hear me way out here?’

‘Yes, Phoenix. Do you have a question?’

‘Yes, I do. What does Elizabeth mean?’

‘It means ‘God is my oath,’ Phoenix.’

‘What the hell does that mean? What’s an ‘oath’ anyway? Jeez! Some kind of promise, isn’t it?’

‘It means you are sworn to God, Phoenix. You are blessed.’

‘Oh, bother! I’m sorry I asked.’

“Am I upsetting you?” Macario asked.

He was teasing her belly button with his tongue, but he could tell her ‘vibes’ were all wrong for him to proceed further.

“What does ‘God is my oath’ mean?” she asked him.

“Why would you want to know that?” he asked, suddenly (always) curious.

“That’s what Elizabeth means!” she growled. “God is my oath! I always thought it was a nice name, too.”

Macario laughed. Despite her ire, she enjoyed hearing him laugh.

“It means you are blessed with the certainty of your rightness of the eyes of God and are devoted to his purpose,” he laughed. “Most Baptists believe they are blessed that way; what few are left, anyway.”

“I’m blessed, huh?” Lisa murmured. “I’d rather not be, if I have a choice.”

“I want it to mean ‘beloved by Macario’,” she said, smiling into the night sky.

“And so you are,” said Macario, and returned to worshipping her body with his tongue. After a few more minutes, Lisa began to squirm and squeal.

“Eeek! I’m ticklish down there!” she squealed as he continued on past her pussy lips and began tonguing her ass. She tried to squirm out of his reach, not wanting him to find anything unpleasant down there.

Mac clasped her hips firmly with his hands and continued his invasion of her anus. After a moment, Lisa relaxed and stopped squirming enough for him to move one hand down and gently shove a finger into her anus.

“Oh! … That feels nice,” Lisa gasped, surprised that he’d want to do something like that to her. “Yes… a little deeper… Oh, God! That feels good!”

Lisa was squirming against his finger, now. Macario licked his way back up to her pussy lips and began licking along the length of her labia, stopping just short of her hardening little clit, teasing her unmercifully. Each time his tongue got close to it, her clit seemed to try to leap into his mouth as Lisa shoved toward him.

“Damn you!” he heard her mutter as he moved away again.

Her pussy was soaked now. Mac shoved his thumb into her wet cunt and began to massage the inside of her pussy, squeezing his thumb against his index finger buried in her ass. Lisa jerked her pelvis upward and squirted on his thumb inside her pussy.

Macario grinned and assaulted her hard little clitoris with his tongue. Lisa had barely finished her orgasm when he sent her screaming into the next, bucking her hips violently against his face and squirting her girl-cum all over his hand.

She dropped her butt down into the sand, pressing both her hands into the back of Macario’s head. She was still coming, and needed his mouth on her clit, sucking, biting, and flicking it with his tongue. She cried out as she came again, but held her hips steady enough so that his mouth didn’t leave her hard little clit this time. She trembled in her effort to hold herself steady as orgasmic sensation flooded her body.

After the next series of twitches subsided, Macario moved his mouth off her clitoris and let her relax. Lisa was coated with sweat from her orgasms. He watched her glistening body as her chest rose and fell, outlining the top of her beautiful stomach with her ribs as they moved up and down with her heavy breathing.

He moved up to lie beside her, accidentally splashing a little sand on her torso with his arms. He touched her nose with his finger and held it there for a moment, grinning evilly, watching her.

Lisa’s eyes flew open and she slapped his hand away, giggling maniacally. She glared at him, barely able to contain herself, then spit in his face as she burst out with another hysterical giggle.

“You… you had that stinky thing in my ass!” she finally gasped, bringing herself back under some semblance of control. “What did you want me to do with it, you pervert? Lick it clean for you?”

She laughed again, gazing into his eyes.

“It’s part of you,” Macario said, gazing back at her. “How can that be bad?”

Lisa continued gazing at him for another moment.

“I’ll lick your thumb,” she said finally, partially giving in to his weird desires.

Mac held his hand up and Lisa delicately licked his thumb, then, deciding it wasn’t so bad, put her lips around it, sucking gently. She could smell his finger as it rested against her cheek.

‘He’s really getting a charge out of this, sorry bastard…’

As she continued sucking on his thumb, pretending it was a little dick, Mac slowly twisted his hand around, lining up his index finger along her lips. Then he had the top knuckle between her lips and was sliding it into her mouth.

“Ow! Holy fuck!” Mac yelled, yanking his hand away from her mouth.

His thumb was bleeding from where she bit him. He watched, astounded, as the bleeding stopped and the bite mark began to heal.

He looked up at Lisa. She was glaring at him angrily. He sighed.

“Don’t do that,” she said, finally.

She noticed his cock, which had been hard and poking her in the side while she sucked on his thumb, was only half-hard now, and shrinking rapidly. She clamped her mouth shut as she felt a strong desire to apologize to him.

“I was only playing,” he said, as near to an apology that he was going to get.

“Is that normal?” Lisa asked, “Sticking your finger in a girl’s ass then expecting her to lick it off?”

“Some girls like it,” Macario replied. “It seems to represent some form of rebellion against their parents’ repressive views, or something, I guess. One actually insisted in licking me clean every time I fucked her back there. Then she’d try to swap tongues with me afterward.”

She got up and went searching for their blanket. Macario jumped up and followed.

“Um, shouldn’t we be packing? Or something?” he asked.

He watched as she shook sand out of the blanket, then laid it back down, spreading it out. He stepped on the far corner as a breeze came in from the ocean and threatened to flip it over.

“We’ll stop by your place in the morning an get whatever you want to take with you,” Lisa told him.

“Uh, okay,” replied Mac. “You’re in charge, I guess.”

He sat down on the blanket to keep it from blowing away as the wind picked up.

“Don’t worry,” Lisa said, dropping down beside him. “You’ll like them. Mom’s an Empath, like me. She likes everybody. Dad? Well, he’s kind of, um, antisocial, I guess. He doesn’t really like anyone but Mom. But he has really good manners. You’ll get along with him.”

“I just think about you and I get all hot, inside,” Lisa said, suggestively.

Macario laughed and ran his hand down her side. Lisa squealed, still ticklish. She could tell he was getting aroused again. She expected it, since he hadn’t been properly finished off, before. She reached down and began caressing his growing cock. He moaned quietly in pleasure. In a moment, he was hard. Lisa scooted back on the blanket and slid down to put her lips around the head of his cock.

His cock welcomed her warm, wet mouth and grew into it, filling it up. Lisa sucked eagerly, secure in her ability to arouse him.

“That’s been in your ass, too,” Mac couldn’t resist saying.

He braced for the pain of her teeth that he was sure he would receive. Instead, she spit his dick out and slid around on the blanket to look up at him.

“And now it’s going right back in,” she told him with a sly grin on her face.

She pushed him back, halfway onto the cold, dry sand and threw her leg over him like she was mounting a horse. As she dropped down, he felt his cock invading her pussy.

“Wrong hole, babe,” he grinned, remembering an old joke about a Japanese golfer.

Lisa ignored him and pumped up and down several times. Then she raised up and, using one hand, guided his pole up against her puckering anus. She gazed down at him, slowing moving her pelvis back and forth, working his cock-head past her splincter muscle. Then she slid down, taking his entire length into her ass in one long, slow, sensuous movement, her legs trembling as she moaned her pleasure to him.

“Now, I’m blessed,” she sighed, smiling down at his lovely face.

She began to move slowly up and down, repeatedly skewering her ass on his hard, slippery cock. In less than a minute, she was crying out in orgasm, leaking her juices onto his pelvis. She collapsed down onto his chest, moaning and breathing heavily.

Still tightly buried in her ass, Macario held her against him and rolled over on his right side, away from the cool wind blowing off the ocean. With one hand he straightened Lisa’s left leg so he wouldn’t be laying on it. Then, holding her gorgeous round rump with both hands and leaving her other leg hanging over his hip, he began moving in and out, slowly fucking her hot, tight little ass some more.

Lisa whimpered into his chest as Macario slowly reamed her. She was quietly coming over and over and over again, trembling in her newly found ecstasy. This was the most beautiful, and absolutely the longest, lovemaking session she had ever had in her short life. She wanted it to last forever. She began kissing and licking her lover’s chest and nipples in gratitude, loving him, loving what he was doing to her, loving the way he loved her. She felt completely wrapped, surrounded with love, lying in his arms. She sighed her contentment, then moaned as she came again.

When she opened her eyes again, it was daylight – midmorning, at least. Lisa sat up, startled. She was in the tent that Juan’s ex-groupies had given to her and Macario for rescuing them. He had evidently set it up and carried her inside and away from the wind after they’d made love last night. She looked around. He wasn’t there.

“Macario?” she called out.

The tent flap flew back and he was there, smiling at her. “Hi. Enjoy your nap?”

He was carrying a backpack.

“Why didn’t you wake me?” she asked, annoyed that he’d parked her in here, then obviously left her.

I thought you might need your rest,” he replied candidly. “Especially after all you did the last couple of days.”

She knew he was right, of course. But it irritated her that she’d gone to sleep while he was making love to her – in the ass, at that!

“I guess I was tireder – more tired? – than I thought,” she admitted. “What’s in the bag?”

“My stuff,” he replied. “You said we’d go get my stuff to take to the airport. You were asleep, and I was too excited and nervous, so I just jogged up to my sister’s and packed some stuff to wear while we’re at your folks.”

“Ooo-kay,” Lisa said slowly. “You realize that if we’d both gone to get your clothes, you wouldn’t have had to come back to the beach?”

She looked up at him, her eyebrows raised.

“Oh,” he said. “How are we going to get there, anyway? Fly? You talked at though you expect to see your parents today. Do you have air fare or anything?”

“We’re going to fuck our way there,” Lisa told him, stripping off the nightshirt that Macario had evidently put on her when he’d carried her into the tent and put her to bed.

“What?” Mac asked, stunned.

He loved this strange supernatural girl, but sometimes she was just too weird!

“I told my folks I was going to fuck my way across America!” she proclaimed. “And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Are you coming with me?”

“Sure!” he said, dropping down beside her. “What do I need to do?”

Lisa looked at him.

“Oh!” Mac began taking off his clothes and Lisa slapped him on his arm.

He looked up into her laughing face. “You didn’t mean it?”

She shook her head, still laughing.

“How much of this stuff do you want to take and how much do you want to leave behind?” she asked.

Macario picked up his bag and held it against his chest. Somehow he understood what was required of him.

“That it?” she asked.

He nodded. Lisa leaned forward and hugged him. As she kissed him, the world vanished. Mac felt like he was spinning around, but that could be because of her lips pressed against his, which always made him feel like that. Then he was in a darkened room, kneeling with Lisa on a bed.

“Welcome to my room,” she said, holding out her hands to present her little world. “This is where I grew up. And you’re the first man, except my dad, to ever be in here.”

Macario gazed around in wonder. Some part of his mind told him there was no ocean nearby. He’d never been more than a few miles from the Pacific in his entire life. He never considered he would be. And now, he was… someplace else!

The bedroom door opened.

“Baby! You’re home!” Béla swept into the room and hugged her darling daughter. “I’m so glad you’re safe! I hate to think what might have happened if you’d tried to teleport into the living room…”

“Why?” Lisa asked. “What’s wrong with the living room?”

Lisa vanished, then almost instantly reappeared. She fell against the headboard of her bed.

“What the hell was that?” she asked, stunned and confused.

“Well,” Béla began, then noticed the strange boy sitting dumbfounded at the foot of the bed. “Hello, I’m Lisa’s mother. And you are…?”

‘Everything! I told him everything. Plus, he’s a long-lifer, now, just like the other humans in your family, Mom.’

“You lied,” Macario said, speaking to Lisa. Both mother and daughter looked at him. “Your mother’s not prettier than you. You’re both as beautiful as each other.”

‘I like him. He can stay.’

‘Hands off! He’s mine!’

“What’s in the living room?” Lisa asked, out loud.

“Well, let’s go downstairs and find out,” Béla replied verbally. “You may as well come too, now that you’re a member of the family.”

“Can all vampires do that?” he asked Lisa. “Read minds, I mean?”

“Yes, but she didn’t read yours, she’s more polite than that,” Lisa assured him. “I told her about us.”

They all trouped downstairs.

“Wow! What have you done to your house?” Macario wanted to know as he looked through the doorway into the living room. “Where’s your ceiling?”

Then he bumped into the invisible barrier. He didn’t have any questions about that. He could no longer form words.

Lisa crept forward unbelievingly, her eyes wide with wonder.

“It’s so beautiful!” she exclaimed.

“What’s so beautiful?” Jake asked. “It’s a room – exactly like our living room – in another time and place. But it’s not ‘beautiful’.”

“You can’t see the colors?” Lisa asked excitedly.

She broadcast her vision to her parents and Macario.

The entire room was shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow. The aborigine girl still standing in the center of the room shimmered the brightest, as though she was filled with pure, raw power. Above the room, rain was dancing on the shield the strange, mud-covered girl had constructed – a colorful shield created by…

“It draws me,” whispered Lisa.

She placed the palm of her hand against the soft resistance that prevented anything from entering. Her hand seemed to dissolve into bands of light racing up and down into eternity.

Suddenly frightened, Lisa tried to draw back, but her hand was caught in the force field. Instinctively, she pressed against the force field with her other hand to pull her trapped hand free. Both her hands dissolved into bands of light racing up and down! She screamed in mortal terror for the first time in her life!

Béla grabbed Lisa by her shoulders and pulled. Lisa was trapped up to her elbows, now. She screamed again and flamed, turning her body into pure energy in a final attempt to escape being drawn into the strange vortex. Béla shrieked in sudden agony as her daughter scorched her, forcing her to let go.

Lisa vanished in a violent flash of light, her flaming body streaking the force field with bright bands of light traveling up and down.

Reading time: ~1.5 hours
not too long, I can cover two long stories in a night. That, and they are very well written. Unlike most, these have good dialogue, believable characters, and a GREAT plot! The time travel works, it is understandable enough to make sense. So often, a story is ruined with bad time travel. This series has been a pleasure to read! Thank you!